All future game updates (news, patch notes, devblog, major announcements) will be moved from this area to the IndieDB entry.

This blog will eventually go away as it doesn't make much sense to maintain duplicate functionality. The forums will remain a place to discuss the game and we'll likely still make announcements about patches there, with links to IndieDB for the patch notes. (the forums aren't the best place for patch notes anyway)

Have you been over to our entry at IndieDB yet? If not, check it out, vote for us, rate the game, follow the game there (so you can get updated when the game gets updated). It's really a great community over there and we like the featureset to keep fans of the game informed.

And stay tuned for game updates. We have a ton planned and can't wait to expand upon the Sim Hero world.

Onward!

The big black unknown is coming into focus as we complete v1 of Sim Hero. 

Today is monumental for our little game as we've graduated beyond 640x480 resolution! (ya know, resolution from 1990)

The resolution fix was a big deal as it opens up some core game features we really wanted to get in there and fixes some of the "wonk" we all experienced with mouse controls.

What's next on the horizon for Sim Hero? 

We continue to prep the remaining planned & contributor content (classes, skills, events & more), so expect that stuff to pour into the game in the coming weeks. Continued tweaking, balance, bug fixes are also planned. 

The next 'literal' big thing should be the castles. Get ready to proudly decide the path of your settlement (and see that visual representation on the map) to truly take things to the next level!

What's beyond that horizon?

It's always tough to talk about "the beyond" as plans & circumstances always change. But, many of the "back-end" improvements y'all see in Sim Hero are actually coming from another -yet to be revealed- PC Sim project we have going on... So, while it takes away a little time from Sim Hero, the benefits have been quite major.

Once Sim Hero is at v1.0, we'll have some announcements on that front, as well as more info on where Sim Hero will go from here. The world is actually 8x the size of the current Sim Hero world (after you open up all adjacent zones), so it's quite large (and I have sneaky plans for a "plot" that could take you back to your homeland to conquer it...). We hope we can get the chance to bring the rest of the Sim Hero experience to you!

We started the redesign to more closely align Sim Hero as advertised - a RPG Management Sim. And I think we've accomplished some great things - you'd be hard-pressed to find an old-school RPG built quite like Sim Hero.

As promised, we had a ton of the content ready to go, and we're quite far along today with the release of v0.2.2 (patch notes are in the Community Forum). 

In the current build, you can:
- Adventure in dungeons (Sim Hero style, of course!)
- Recruit & Customize your heroes with primary/sub classes, hundreds of skills, choose from thousands of pieces of loot, train them to gain special abilities, and watch them progress/regress as they adventure... the level of Hero customization is mind-boggling, and some of it happens organically as the Heroes train & adventure)
- Assign a hero to be your Guard Captain to help fight battles alongside your Army. Assign another hero as your Champion to deal with a CRISIS or perhaps investigate a POINT OF INTEREST.
- Explore the land with MAPS (unlock new zones to conquer, explore & adventure in)
- Manage your Villagers by setting them to tasks (chopping wood, mining tin, smelting bronze, farming for food, guarding the settlement, burning wood for charcoal, entertaining the populace, performing diplomacy w/neighbors, hosting feasts, scouting the land, scribing books, tending livestock, butchering that livestock and much MUCH more)
- Expand your settlement by building & upgrading a myriad of structures. Watch it all grow from meager tents into soaring battlements & fine establishments.
- Craft gear & trade goods. Focus your crafting into several specialized disciplines.
- Encounter, Squabble & Trade with neighbors (so much more to come on diplomacy that we never could have done with the old design)
- Make choices and deal with over 50 different events (and counting!), including several UNIQUE events which are super-rare, can only happen once and offer drastic choices to be made.
- Try to survive as long as possible!

Some things you can expect as we develop the next 4 zones of content:
- More, more and MORE classes including knights, mages & elementalist classes who can have a summoned elemental "pet" ala Beast Tamers and their animal companion. The goal is to allow free-form hero building so you can pull-off that awesome combo you always dreamed about (for example: You can build an Undead WightMage who causes Fear through her claws & spells, and "feeds" on that fear -if an enemy is feared- and has several attacks which chain into mass crippling against Feared foes... /satisifiedgroan)
- More, more and even MORE loot
- More events (yeah, we promised ONE more event type on the Kickstarter Stretch Goals... I think we've added 40+ beyond the planned events... Geek Fever Games is all about overachieving!)
- More dungeons, bringing back the dungeons in the previous design - can you defeat the Chimera? (content designed to take the heroes up to level 20)
- More villager types, mines & crafting materials (such as Brass, Iron, Steel)
- More UNIQUE choices to take your settlement down a certain path (next one could involve a Mages' Guild, Temple or Alchemist Lab)
- Recruitable Fey back in the game
- Kickstarter contributor content re-introduced into the game!
- Some interface cleanup & enhancements
- Kid-Gloves come off (get ready for multiple crises hitting at once - do you have what it takes to adeptly manage your kingdom in the face of it all?)
- Bug Fixes & Balance Changes
... and so much more!

We'd love to hear from you!
Post screenshots of your settlement and/or party in the Community forum. Have you discovered an obscure class combo that absolutely rocks? Let's see some stats & combat log brags! 
 

Here it is!

Sim Hero has undergone an overhaul. A good overhaul. A needed overhaul.

Download now!

Right now, the game is light on content while we balance/redesign. So, download and play if you want, but just understand that we are focusing testing the new gameplay. Most of the content is built, it's just waiting to be slotted-in. The gameworld is 32x the size of the little starting area, so there's plenty to explore!

Check out the new Getting Started guide here.

We believe this is the right direction and it's where we always wanted it to be. 

More updates and information to come!

Sim Hero is now open for all to play!

Download here.

Instructions for installation can be found at the download link as well. New player guide can be found here.

You may also discuss the game on our Community forums.

We've constantly refined & added during ALPHA & CLOSED BETA phases, but now we want to open the doors to more players to more fully test the game. So, feel free to share the link and get engaged in the discussion to help make Sim Hero as excellent as possible.

Thanks and happy adventuring!
- The Sim Hero team

Sim Hero enters Closed Beta Testing!

Emails are on their way out to all Kickstarter & Website contributors with the Beta download link & Beta info.

The full list of recent changes appear below:

Completed:

- MOVE INTO CLOSED BETA


Changes:

- All crafted gear boosted slightly
- Loot scripts tweaked to sometimes hand out less loot
- The Event System got an overhaul:
RESULT: Events 2 places in the future are determined at time of previous event resolution, negating the 
ability to save/load until a "favorable" event is rolled.
RESULT: The war events got some variety and the math was overhauled to actually work now. No more easy 
fights!
RESULT: Fiddled with the frequency of certain events.
RESULT: Added a new event type to potentially "give back" Happiness, Safety or Resources. Will expand 
upon this down the road.
RESULT: Slightly increased the amount of troops gained when recruiting troops.


Fixes:

- Fixed an instance where a War Hero would join the Court instead of the Reserves.
- Fixed court XP gain from some monsters (raised to normal levels - it was far too low)
- Fixed Event Battle Resolution Event text to include current *Safety* level on battle win/loss message.
- Fixed (hopefully all) instances where the wrong cutscene would play, or multiple cutscenes would 
play. This may cause some "cutscene weirdness" if you don't start over, but the worst that happens is 
you watch a duplicate cutscene once. Certainly no reason to start the game over if you don't want to.


Enjoy!
- The Sim Hero Team

March has been a busy & productive alpha testing month. In fact, it's been so smooth - we plan to open things up to the closed Beta testers much sooner than anticipated!

The biggest change on the horizon is the Event system. It needs a code overhaul and some new features (like, an event which allows the recovery of Happiness, Safety & Resources). Stay tuned for that.

Patch notes appear below, for all the major releases over the past 2 weeks (newest first). Enjoy!

- The SimHero team


Patch 0.0.4

> Completed:
- STRETCH GOAL: Recruitable Fairy & Centaur heroes.
- CLASS: Knight Errant
- CLASS: Dragon Knight (contributor content)
- DUNGEON: Ancient Wyrm Cave (contributor content)
- UNIQUE HERO (recruitable): Artur Erebus (contributor content)

> Changes:
- Minor review of the Marksman class. TP costs & Damage adjusted favorably, slightly.
- Dwarves are more resistant to poison & disease
- Migrated the remaining Court battles to the new scaling system
- Begun to add in some of the new, commissioned Orc portraits
- Changed all goblin sprites to the new, commissioned Goblin sprites
- Review of loot rolls & higher level difficulties balancing:
Result: Purple & better gear is more rare. (you can sometimes "sneak" a purple out under the old chances tho)
Result: Higher difficulty remained okay, so no changes made
Result: will continue to test higher difficulty dungeons for tweaks


> Fixes:
- Human Artifacts should now be properly found in the correct dungeons
- Tweaked the drop rates for "special" dungeon find items to be a tad more favorable in certain cases
- Fixed a few cutscenes
- Fixed a few bugs with the Training info messages
- Fixed a few more remaining cases where summoned allies would be DOA
- Fixed a few dialog errors
- NOW, When a hero returns from training, the training hall will properly show nobody "currently training"


Patch 0.0.3

> Changes:
- Re-tooled Court battles to add more variety and have it scale better as the game progresses 
- Re-tooled how "special" items get handed out. (they are now a special roll in a dungeon's loot roll) 
- Added a one-time quest to the abandoned mine on the island 

> Fixes: 
- ITEM drop rates were too high (compared to Weapons/Armor). Code was changed a while ago to lower them, but it wasn't changed in all required places. Fixed now. Armor/Weapons should drop more frequently than Items (as intended)
- Fixed instances where a hero would summon an ally, and that ally would not arrive


Patch 0.0.2

> Completed: 
- CLASS: Yellow Mage 
- CLASS: Lord 

> Changes: 
- Added more Contributor Content 
- Added a few unique Warlord skills 
- Changed undead hero graphics to commissioned art 
- Added an option to force wandering NPCs to "Make Way" and get out of your way - to prevent NPC traffic jams.

> Fixes: 
- Fixes a game crashing bug when producing armor/weapons from a Worksite. 
- Various typo fixes 
- Various Class Fixes 
- Fixed a bug where a cutscene wouldn't allow the switching of parties afterwards. 
- Fixed the Tent icon (General Item) 
- When a hero returns from training, the training hall will now properly show nobody "currently training"

Alpha Testing!

If you donated $10 or more during the Kickstarter campaign (or directly through our website), you should have gotten an email. (check your spam/junk mail folder if you don't see it) The email has everything you need to get started with the Alpha build of the game.

Sim Hero is fully playable & beatable in its current form with dozens of classes & dungeons and hundreds of items. This is just the beginning of Alpha, so we will be adding many features & content as we move along towards Beta.

If you plan to help us test, please file bug reports here.

A few things are on the weaker side (like Court battles) and will be improved straight away. We also have Orc artwork almost completed so all those graphics are simply placeholders for now. 

Many thanks to everyone who has supported us this far! Now get out there and send some perfectly good heroes to their deaths!

- The GeekFever Team

This is it! LAST update before alpha. We just have a few things to tweak before Alpha invites go out!

Sim Hero Bug Fixes / Additions

Completed:

- ZONE: Southern Wilds
- ZONE: Southeast
- ZONE: Northern Steppes
- ZONE: Blasted Crossroads
- DUNGEON: Pirate Camp
- DUNGEON: Sunken Temple
- DUNGEON: Volcano
- DUNGEON: Frozen Mine
- DUNGEON: Chimera's Lair
- STORY: The barebones of the cutscenes & "story" are all in place... will flesh it out and make it "whole" by the end of Beta testing.
- CRAFTING: Tier2 Crafting loot tables complete.
- CLASS: Necromancer (yes, you can summon skeletons -more to come- into battle)
- CLASS: Red Mage
- CLASS: Blue Mage
- CLASS: Green Mage


Changes:

- Magic damage was lacking compared to weapon damage... boosted it slightly thru loot & skill tweaks.

- Added Holy-type DOT state: PENANCE

- Added a few buffs tied with various new skills

- All "top" skills either Cooldown or Warmup to prevent "1 trick pony" builds. Now, perhaps, the worst will be "2 trick ponies". 


Fixes:

- Some of the very first monsters still had way too high evade & crit values... brought them back down to the "new" levels.

- Somehow, Dwarves lost their slight resistance to Disease. Added back in.

- Various skill & class bugfixes

We are really on the home stretch now for Alpha. Since I streamlined the code & processes, adding dungeons doesn't take nearly as long as it once did... and the last few dungeons are all that's left (for Alpha, anyway)! 

We hope to release an alpha build within 1 month, if all remains smooth. 

Anyway, check out the new updates for late February:

Completed:

- ZONE: Western Wilds (added & completed)
- DUNGEON: Barbarian Camp (lvl 4)
- DUNGEON: Twisted Forest (lvl 6)
- DUNGEON: Western Tomb (lvl 10)
- DUNGEON: Ogre Cave (lvl 9) << some dungeons will have optimal strategies to them... this is the 1st. You will face fewer enemies with more Health. So, all those AoE attacks might not be as effective. All T2 dungeons will have a "theme" like this moving forward (hordes of enemies, resist a certain element, lots of a certain element damage, high DEF enemies, high health enemies, etc etc).
- LOOT: First pass completed on T2 Weapons, Armor & Items (this basically doubles the amount of loot in the game... much more to come!)
- BUILDING: Gear Shop upgrades done
- BUILDING: Mage Tower upgrades done
- BUILDING: Trading Post upgrades done
- CLASS: Dark Mage added
- CLASS: Merchant added


Changes:

- adjusted loot tables. you will now have a chance to see better loot at lower levels.
- added a few more merchants to the overlands maps
- added the "Decompose" state which triggers off some Dark Damage skills. DoT which damages HP, TP and MP.


Fixes:

- Fixed an issue where a hero coming back from training would be added to the court.
- Fixed an issue where the boat would not "reset" to an accessible location in some instances.
- Fixed the "XP Gain" basic skill